Joe Blundo commentary: E-cigarettes seem to hold hazy appeal at best

Friday

Jan 3, 2014 at 12:01 AMJan 5, 2014 at 10:19 AM

Here's a prediction for 2014: E-cigarettes won't become glamorous. Why? Someone puffing on a faux cigarette with a red light at the tip looks like a 6-year-old playing with a toy light saber. The activity, by the way, is called "vaping" because what is being inhaled and exhaled is flavored water vapor, not smoke.

Here’s a prediction for 2014: E-cigarettes won’t become glamorous.

Why? Someone puffing on a faux cigarette with a red light at the tip looks like a 6-year-old playing with a toy light saber.

The activity, by the way, is called “vaping” because what is being inhaled and exhaled is flavored water vapor, not smoke.

Disposable, battery-powered vaping devices are made to simulate old-fashioned cigarettes. Also available are larger, rechargeable models of greater length and diameter. Some of them vaguely resemble cordless screwdrivers.

Whether these things are harmless and good for easing off smoking (the water vapor contains nicotine and other ingredients) is still up for debate. But one fear of anti-smoking people is that they will lure people into nicotine addiction by achieving the same sexiness that cigarettes had.

Seriously? A metal-and-glass tube that looks as if it escaped from an industrial boiler? I have no idea whether it’s the product that will make old-fashioned cigarettes obsolete. But, in terms of sexiness, I’d rate it somewhere between the asthma inhaler and the curly straw.

Of course, that raises the question of why the product it seeks to supplant was ever seen as glamorous.

In the abstract, it’s ridiculous that humans found the sight of a person holding a burning, tobacco-stuffed cylinder in their mouths alluring. But they did. Movie history is full of sexy smoking scenes: Sharon Stone’s seductive inhaling; Clint Eastwood’s menacing cigar clench; Sean Connery’s suave lighter click.

All I can figure is that it had to be the fire. Fire is dangerous and fascinating, and kept our ancestors alive on the savanna.

Maybe that’s what made smoking such an attractive spectacle: The sight of a person casually and elegantly playing with fire called to something in our genes.

I don’t see it as translating easily to vaping devices. What would be the equivalent of Humphrey Bogart lighting Lauren Bacall’s cigarette? Putting on his reading glasses so he can adjust the little voltage dial on her Vape-Pro Deluxe doesn’t seem quite as provocative a gesture.

Granted, times change.

When I see Bogart smoking on-screen now, I recall that he died at age 57 of esophageal cancer.

Mad Men makes my lungs twitch in alarm at the thought of having to work in that smoky ’60s office.

Perhaps the battery-powered cigarette, even without fire, will rise to take the place of the real thing as a symbol of glamour.

Perhaps Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson will play a vixen who makes men swoon with the way she spews a stream of water vapor, and hordes will rush to follow the example.